gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » gmail unsubscribe

Thunderbird: Unsubscribe Mailing Lists

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:34:31 +0000

Thunderbird day today? Not sure about that but today is the day where two interesting new add-ons have been posted at the Thunderbird website. The first was the add-on that increased the mass mailing functionality in the web browser. The Unsubscribe From Mailing Lists add-on does exactly that. It provides an option to unsubscribe from mailing lists from withing the email client. A feature similar to the one that Gmail is offering to its users for some time now.

The process is very simply. The Thunderbird add-on will automatically display an option to unsubscribe from support mailing lists in the header of the emails that are send to the accounts that are managed in the desktop email client.

The Thunderbird user needs to click on the unsubscribe link in the header to initiate the process of unsubscribing from the mailing lists. This will display a prompt informing the user that the add-on will open a new email message which, when send by the user, will unsubscribe the email address from the mailing list.

The email usually consists of an email address of the service that send the mailing list email and subject unsubscribe in the email subject with no body text at all. The unsubscribe link is only displayed for mailing lists that use the Inxmail email marketing service which is used by global brands such as Coca Cola. The add-on is compatible with Thunderbird 2 and Thunderbird 3 up to beta 3 which excludes the latest release of Thunderbird 3 beta. The add-on can however be forced to be compatible with the Nightly Tester Tools. A download is available at the Thunderbird website over at Mozilla.

Gmail Automatic Newsletter Unsubscribing

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:45:31 +0000

One cannot really say that Google is not working hard to make Gmail a better service. They started to introduce many features in the online email client lately that would not only be offered as an experimental widget or function in Gmail labs but also some that were introduced to all Gmail users at once. We mentioned a few days ago that Gmail started displaying images for trusted contacts right away which in itself was a nice addition to the email service.

Another new service was introduced only a few days later. This new service allows Gmail users to automatically unsubscribe from email newsletters. All that needs to be done is to either report the email as spam which will bring up the unsubscription option or to click on the Show Details link in the top right corner and to click on the appearing Unsubscribe from this sender link (if it does not appear it means the newsletter cannot be unsubscribed from automatically).

This sounds – in theory – like a good new feature but there are a few limitations currently in place.

The unsubscribing option is only available for some legit newsletter providers. This is understandable as it would not make sense to unsubscribe a user from a spam newsletter as it is likely that the user did not signup for that newsletter in first place and that the cancellation request would result in more spam than in less because of the verification of the email address.

Not all legit newsletter providers are supported as well at this point. The Gmail blog gives some information on how to prepare a newsletter for the automatic unsubscription. It is definitely a welcome feature that needs broader support to become effective for the majority of users.